Behr, Bernd (2021) Solar economy of the debt-image (blockchain edition). In: The promise of photography: scale, measure and proportion in a conflicted visual milieu, 17 September 2021, Online.
Type of Research: | Conference, Symposium or Workshop Item |
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Creators: | Behr, Bernd |
Description: | This paper recasts the contemporary explosion of NFTs (Non-fungible tokens) – an application of blockchain technology and their attendant cryptocurrencies to produce an artificial economic scarcity for digital images – in terms of photography’s equivalency to currency, from its first articulation by Oliver Wendell Holmes’ in 1859 to Peter Szendy’s recent formulation of the ‘debt-image’ (2019). Focussing on the graphics processing unit (GPU) as the hardware nexus of the escalating currency of photorealism and the material realism of mining cryptocurrencies, the paper proposes to frame the vast energy demands of blockchain technology in relation to photography’s solar debt, and NFTs as a planetary potlatch within a Bataillean general economy. |
Official Website: | https://foto.amu.cz/en/news/the-promise-of-photography-scale-measure-and-proportion-in-a-conflicted-visual-milieu/ |
Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed: | NFT, blockchain, cryptocurrencies, GPU, Georges Bataille, general economy, Oliver Wendell Holmes, scale, parallel computation, theory of photography |
Your affiliations with UAL: | Colleges > Camberwell College of Arts |
Date: | 17 September 2021 |
Funders: | FAMU (The Photography Department of the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague), Philosophy of Photography |
Event Location: | Online |
Date Deposited: | 01 Mar 2022 11:02 |
Last Modified: | 01 Mar 2022 11:02 |
Item ID: | 17855 |
URI: | https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/17855 |
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